ginger bread houses

"Its just not proper"

well that's what my wife decided after living here for her first Christmas. Being a Finn she loved the things which Finns do in Christmas time, like bake and decorate Gingerbread houses. She was pretty darn good at it too. She was surprised and saddened that all we got here was plastic rubbish like this which (as she would point out) you can't even eat...

Every year in Finland Anita would make gingerbread houses and distribute them to the family.

My influence on this was the suggestions of subject matter (and I'm not entirely sure how this started). Naturally we went though a variety of themes:

• gingerbread beach houses (with surfboards)
• gingerbread scrub shacks (with crocodiles)

but my favourite ever was the gingerbread Honda S-600, based naturally on my own Honda S-600

This car was "under restoration" even back then, and now is more or less stripped and gutted in different parts of my house. But it was my promise to Anita that it would be finished and become her car (and wouldn't she have looked HOT driving it).

So what would such a creation look like? Well I happened to document the process of creation(and a pineapple, come on, its TROPICAL).

note the driver inspecting the diff on car #2 while the other driver is just chilling with those marshmallow chicks in the pan ...

Almost ready for the road with their cool curving wind screens (trade secret) the teams pose for the press.

Naturally no photo session would be complete without the hot marshmallow chick posing on the back of the car in front of a big pineapple.

The cars were all received well by the family and eaten as they should be.

My lovely wife tied to make similar things here in Australia, but Queensland being tropical (well near enough that only an academic would point out the latitude issues) and in the Southern Hemisphere that when the "time is right" the weather is wrong.

32°C days (yes that's nearly 90 for you 18thC Fahrenheit users) with high humidity (think Florida) lead to ginger bread houses collapsing (which I guess explains why we don't have decent ones here). So after one year with lots of "voi vittu" emanating from the kitchen and me using the Air Con and plastic bags to seal them into, we decided that gingerbread doesn't suite Australian Christmas.

So ... we lead closer to the time of Christmas. During which I'd like to share some of my wife's wonderful character with you.

I'll leave you with my wifes only blog post ... she was a good baker and wrote some advice on baking to assist experts who may have forgotten the lessons they learned early on.

howtofuckupyourbaking.blogspot.com